Schubert's fugues

It's not often you come across a Schubert fugue. Last night, however, I had the good fortune to hear at least two. In the 'Late Night' Prom, Richard Hickox was performing Schubert's final Mass in E flat Major, an unjustly neglected work, written only months before Schubert's death. Very nicely played it was too.

Austrian Franz SchubertÂ began composing in his teens

Among a wealth of original and interesting material I would have been happy just listening to the double-bass line stand out the two neat fugues. Were they perhaps the product of his counterpoint lesson(s?) with Simon Sechter during his last year alive? It seems unlikely if, as I have read somewhere, he only had a single class.

Schubert was also taught counterpoint by Antonio Salieri when he was in his late teens. However, according to Schubert's biographer, Alfred Einstein, his two piano fantasias of 1811 and 1813 (he would have been 14 and 16 years old respectively) show that he had already learnt the art of counterpointÂ "by imitation", and had no need to wait for Salieri's instruction, which did not begin until nine months later, on 12th June, 1812.

Einstein goes on: "It is not animated counterpoint; but that is something which not even Salieri could have taught him". In the E flat mass the counterpoint is, precisely this, animated, and at times reminiscent of Bach.

We know that he had some of Bach's fugues in his possession in 1824 though, Einstein insists, we "do not know what impression they made on him."

Well, Alfred, I think we do.

"For the fugue [in the Gloria], Schubert uses the same 'Magnificat' subject which Bach developed in the E major fugue of his Well-tempered Clavier, Book IIÂ… [But] the most remarkable movement is the Agnus Dei.

Schubert uses, as his chief material, a double theme, one part of which is identical with the subject of Bach's C sharp minor Fugue from the Well-tempered Clavier, Book I." That's all from Einstein again.

Simon Sechter, on the other hand, Schubert's final teacher, tried to write a fugue a day, completing over 5,000, making him the most prolific composer in history. Not a single one, it seems, has ever been recorded.